(R)-3-Hydroxybutyric acid is a readily available, cheap, chiral starting material useful in a number of synthetic methods, see for example Seidel et Seebach, Tet. Lett. 2209 (1984) and the references contained therein.
We have now discovered chemical intermediates, useful in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries, that can be prepared from (R)-3-hydroxybutyric acid.